We talk a lot about library marketing at Mosio. Being that marketing is one of the most important needs in the success and continuation of a business, we believe it’s the same for libraries. From what we’ve seen in the industry over the past few years, those libraries who are great at marketing are doing well, financially, in their communities, etc. There are always exceptions, but it appears to be the case. I was just speaking with someone in client services and they told me about a recent email conversation they’d had with a Text a Librarian customer.

Her question, which is a great one, was:
“Is there anything that you would like us to emphasize, that you wish everyone would do/get?”

His response:
“I think that the best advice that I can give a library is this: Focus on getting the info on how to text in on your patron’s phone as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter how much training you do, if your patrons don’t know how to text in or even that you provide the service, you won’t get any questions.”

Go Live, Make Updates
Nearly every successful company in the software as a service industry is known for pushing things live, then improving upon them after customers start using them. If you wait until everything is perfect, you’ll always be waiting, putting too much effort in areas that have nothing to do with getting it out into the world. We do our best to make responding to questions as simple as possible, within 1 minute of logging in you can figure out how to respond. It might seem like a hidden business pitch, but it’s really the truth.

Focus the “training” on how to educate and market your Text a Librarian service to patrons and you’ll have a great reason to learn the workings of the system.

I hate to waste great content, so I’ve pasted the rest of his advice typically given to academic libraries, below. Our biggest usage at academic libraries comes from libraries who show students how to text them during orientation, literally by having them pull out their phones and text for instructions.

In his words:
“So at academic institutions we’ve seen a lot of success with libraries that pull all of their students aside during orientation and say, “pull out your phones and text (keyword) to 66746.”  Obviously the library can substitute their own keyword.  When a student does that they get the intro Text for Instructions message to their phone.

This makes sure that when that student has a question on their phone 2 weeks later they don’t have to remember the keyword or the shortcode (66746) because it’s already on their phone.  That’s my 2 cents.”

Experiential Marketing Ideas for Libraries
Ingesting information online is, for the most part, a visual experience.  Books deliver information to us visually, but in a more tangible way.  In a similar vein, its the palpable nature of a library that gives it a distinct advantage over info-fishing, researching or reading online.  If more librarians looked at this distinction as a marketing advantage, than a cross they’ve been chosen bear, they may see a resurgence in traffic.  Well… maybe.

This is not a “Let’s make Libraries cool to everyone!” post.   This is a collection of experiential ideas libraries could use (or may have used) to make them current, fun and generally approachable to more people.  Brands can always use more customers and libraries can always use more patrons. I suppose that makes this a “Let’s make libraries relevant to anyone who may consider them irreverent and dated!” post.  For best results, please print this and tape it to the first page of your favorite book before reading.

1) “Love Thy Theater” (Co-Brand)
Since people are never going to just stop going to movies, the best thing libraries could do is collaborate with them.  A perfect opportunity to really illustrate that almost all movies start out as (drumroll please)… BOOKS! Whether this is in a literal sense where a film has been adapted from a novel or in cerebral sense where characters, scenarios, plot-points or just general ideas have been “borrowed” from a book, this is an opportunity to show kids that the majority of the movies they watch are actually derived from the “dead” papers (standby for a “NO WAAAY!” moment here).

Here’s how you make the experience meaningful – work with local movie theatres to give away movie passes to kids who read the book from which the movie was adapted (or within the same theme.  The idea here is to get kids reading books of the movies they already love.  By tightening the parallel between the two you not only get people reading more, you enhance the experience they have with the book AND the film.

2) Scavenger Hunt (Community Branding)
Millions of characters, locations and plots, mountains of cataloged information and all of it spread out in a single venue.  Let’s face it, libraries are the most natural place on the planet to have a scavenger hunt.  Bring in kids of all ages in the community, have them form teams and set them loose on a half day adventure around the library looking for clues, physical clues, of any subject matter in the world.  Not only is this a fun, interactive educational experience for anyone who participates, it gets them familiar with the lay of the land within the library.  Purposely take them on a hunt that leads them through every stack, by every reference desk and in front of every computer lab in the space.  They’ll know where everything is at and feel much more comfortable navigating their way through the next time they’re back.  And, yes, they will be back.

3) “Its all good” – (PR Concept)
An ongoing promotion where the library is willing to forgive-and-forget by paying all Late Fees to get people back in the doors.  It would be interesting to throw in a “fun-barter” element here, as well.  Overdue fees are paid if you come in and read to kids for an hour (promotes community involvement), take a tour of the new facility (Shows off new features and gives patrons a reason to come back and use them) – think of this as a reunion of sorts with people you have not seen in a very long time.  A light-hearted act, but one of kindness nonetheless – whether you feel your library needs to loosen up or not, this is a step in that direction. Sidenote: I don’t know how much money libraries make from late fees (I remember reading awhile back that it was 15% of Blockbuster’s revenues), so that amount of money might have to be weighed against the buzz generated for the concept.

4) Quiz Show
Add a gaming element by doing a weekly quiz show.  All questions are centered around one weekly showcased book.  Quiz questions, small but fun prizes (could be donated by local businesses)  – brings community together.

5) “Book Club Host Certification”
I realize many are doing this already, but it’s worth mentioning: Libraries should want to host as many book clubs, as possible.  It brings in new patrons, strengthens the relationship it has with existing customers and creates an aura of openness with the community it resides.  It is also to the library’s advantage to make book clubs as fun as experience as possible for those attending.  Through Attack!’s work on the Underground Book Club in recent months, I have had the opportunity to attend several book clubs.  I can tell you that these are not the same book clubs my Mom used to drag me to as a kid.  I witnessed attendees reading passages in character, many of them in costume as characters in the book.  I saw supporting games and contests.  I saw an INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE.  And I saw one important thing holding all of them together: a moderator.  A moderator who knew their members, encouraged involvement and lead the discussion and activities beginning-to-end.  If libraries want book clubs to stick, they need to “train” people on how to manage and maintain them in a way that keeps them interesting.  If the librarians could offer free “Book Club Training Classes”, complete with a “Starter Kit” and a time/place within the library to hold it, you’ve won.  You’ve empowered people to get creative, provided a venue and offered ongoing support to help it thrive.  You’ve built it, they will come.

About the Author:
Andrew Loos co-founded Attack! 2001 as a way to apply his passion toward the experiential marketing movement that was sweeping the marketing industry. In his current role as CXO, Andrew has built Attack! into one of the largest guerrilla marketing, field support and event staffing companies in the country. As a progressive force in the industry, he’s authored several articles in trade publications such as Promo Magazine and Chief Marketer, EXPERIENTIAL TO COLLEGE CLASSROOMS and was recently a guest speaker at Google for ForumCon 2011. He lives with his wife, son and two dogs in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, all of whom agree that Andrew is equal parts awesome and amusing. Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn.

The hype surrounding QR codes is T–H–I–C–K! In libraries and even more so in marketing and advertising. It makes sense that everyone is excited about them. QR codes fairly easy to create, time making them is the only cost and even though one cannot track how many times they’ve been scanned (a big bummer in my opinion), there has to be some success with them or the excitement wouldn’t be there.

People with smart phones are pulling them out and scanning them when they see them, right? Do you have a QR code scanner on your phone? Did you scan my code above when you saw it? So are they worth it? I’m still not sure. Some would say “it’s better to have them so people have the option” and others would disagree.

Here’s what I definitely know: on my iPhone (3GS), I have 3 QR code Scanner apps. After being frustrated with two others because they wouldn’t read the scan properly, our CTO told me to get Optiscan because you start scanning and it just stops when it gets a scan rather than making you take a photo that might not be a good read. I’ve scanned less than 1 dozen QR codes total.

Here’s a presentation from this year’s SXSW about QR Codes and how they are everywhere. Below that I’ve embedded a cool Pet Shop Boys Remix video using them. Enjoy!

As we gear up for another ALA Annual the company has had some interesting discussions on new announcements and our directions in the world of library software.

A couple of weeks ago I had a great meeting/conversation with one of our partners and the discussion of library customer service came up. At the end of our partner meeting, someone said “we can give patrons access to all of the data in the world, but if we aren’t there for them from a customer service standpoint, it won’t matter.” Very true. Andy Woodworth’s blog post “Why Closing More Public Libraries Might Be the Best Thing (…Right Now)” [link below] came up in an internal company meeting, specifically his two points about customer service and advocacy (from the comments it seems the post got a lot of people talking).

The idea of improved customer service, whether at libraries or businesses in general, will continue to be a significant function of an organization’s success in the information age. Aaron Tay’s recent blog post about regularly scanning Twitter and the web for feedback is great (he gives some tips on how to do so) [link below], obviously taking a page from what many companies are doing as part of their customer service: listening to social media mentions for good and bad comments. Neither are the first to talk about the ongoing need for pro-active/reactive customer service in libraries, but both are current and relevant.

So what does this mean for Mosio and Text a Librarian?

We’re still very new to libraries and we LOVE working with them. Frankly, we’re just getting started. While we have friends who are librarians and have a handful of amazing people advising us, we’re not librarians ourselves, nor have we ever pretended to be. In many ways we see this as a distinct advantage to building our product: we cast aside any preconceived ideas of how things should be done and focus instead on simplicity, usability and feedback from our customers. We also know the inner workings of mobile technologies, enabling us to offer reliable (and certified) mobile services to libraries. We recently made an announcement that Mosio’s Text a Librarian is being used by over 500 academic and public libraries. It’s something we’re very proud to have accomplished in such a short amount of time, but we could not have done it without listening to the people who matter most to our success, the librarians who use our software with the benefit of communicating with more patrons on-the-go. The combination of our expertise and passion about creating an amazing library service will continue to be the keys to our ongoing success.

Text Messaging: It’s Not Just for Reference Anymore

In the same announcement we also mentioned that Mosio is now offering our full list of mobile services to libraries. Text messaging can be used for so many things beyond virtual reference and we’re set up to offer additional services to the benefit of our customers. We’re thrilled to be able to continue working with new and existing customers in offering technology solutions that will help us fulfill our vision for our library software: Patron Relationship Management.

Patron Relationship Management

We truly believe this is going to be one of the key tools libraries will need in the future to maintain great patron relationships and relevance in the community. Two comments we hear often are “I wish we could answer all patron questions this way” and “I wish everything could be in one place.” One of those comments we take as a compliment, the other we are taking seriously as a wish list item. Our goal for Text a Librarian was always to start simply, create web-based software that’s easy to use, reliable and certified by the mobile carriers, then grow additional features, elements and uses to continue giving more patrons access to libraries on their mobile phones. You can expect to see more from us in the mobile technology space, but every new product or service we add will have patron communications and relationship management in mind.

Links

Andy Woodworth: Why Closing More Public Libraries Might Be the Best Thing (…Right Now)
Aaron Tay: Why libraries should proactively scan Twitter & the web for feedback – some examples
LISWire: Mosio’s Text a Librarian in Over 500 Libraries, Announces Add-On Mobile Services

Use the Buzz to Build One

Google’s new microblogging service, is getting a lot of, well, buzz. “Hello World!” has literally been replaced by “Buzz! Buzz!” by new people trying it out. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the best way to explain it:

It’s all of the elements that one could think of getting out of Twitter (more than 140 characters, the ability to post videos and photos) packed neatly into your gmail account. While there are still some kinks to work out (you get an email every time someone you’re following posts or comments, which could get really annoying fast), Gmail’s built-in active user base of 176 million users is making it a clear force to be reckoned with.

In comparison, Twitter claims to have 75 million users and about 25% of accounts are reported to be inactive. Foursquare, known by some as “The Twitter of 2010″ is similar in that you “check in” using GPS on your phone and has been building momentum in it’s growth. David Lee King recently had a great post about it called “Foursquare and Libraries – Definitely Something There!” And I would agree, but it seems Buzz might be hot on the trail as it has the same built-in GPS/Geo-Location features and it works directly with Google Maps. Granted, it’s currently missing the fun “Mayor” game element Foursquare has, but this is a numbers game and Google definitely has numbers.

Library Marketing Tips for Using Google Buzz

If you have any other ideas or thoughts, post them in the comments.

Happy Buzzing!

Update: Someone just Buzzed me this great post from AEXT.net entitled 12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz, worth a read.

Then and Now…

Faberge Shampoo started it all with their famous commercial from the 1970s. Peggy Barber and Linda Wallace nail it in their new article, “The Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing” in the November issue of American Libraries Magazine. We wrote a post called “Word of Mouth: The Best Form of Social Media” as part of our Library Marketing Tips series.

I definitely recommend reading the whole article, but here are short versions of their “Why WOMM?” bullets to get you started:
1. It’s real and immediate.
2. It’s personal.
3. It’s honest.
4. It’s catching.
5. It’s customer-driven.

More Info and Articles

1. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has a great educational section, WOMMA 101, giving some great initial information as well as their Best Practices Handbook (free in PDF).

2. A great blog post from Marketing Vox containing some stats (and charts and graphs), Real-Life WOM Beats Online by a Wide Margin.

3. About.com article Why Word-of-Mouth Marketing? by Laura Lake.

Shhhhh…don’t tell anybody.

There are enough topics around the subject of library marketing for an entire blog. In fact, Jill Stover posted to her blog, Library Marketing, Thinking Outside the Book, for 3 years and it has some amazing ideas. That said, we’re on the final week of Library Marketing Tips, so we’ve decided to throw in a few Tools, Tricks and How Tos to think about, try out and share. If you’re finding this post randomly, you might be interested in parts 1-3, linked below.
Library Marketing Tips, Part 1: Avoiding the Noise (Templates Inside)

Library Marketing Tips, Part 2: The Morning News, Videos and Slideshows

Library Marketing Tips, Part 3: Word of Mouth, the Best Form of Social Media

Tool – Google Analytics

This is one of our favorites. Google Analytics allows you to go extremely deep with information about your site, but what makes us love it in its simplest form is that it lets you see where people are coming from (other webistes and search terms), what they are doing on your site while they are there (which pages get the most clicks and traffic) and at what point they left (exit pages). It’s free to sign up with a Google account and requires you to paste some code into your website. This may take a “pretty please” to your webmaster or IT Manager, but it’s well worth it and once they enter the code, you have access to the information on your own, requiring nothing else from them (unless what you find out about your site should be changed to provide a better experience for visitors).

Here are two blog posts (The Huge Collection of Google Analytics Tips and Google Analytics Maximized: Deeper Analysis, Higher ROI & You) that give a little more detail on what you can do when you’re ready, but after getting the GA code on your site, here are a few things to get you started:

1. Traffic Sources – This lets you know how visitors found you, via websites and search terms. This one is great because it can help you see whether your Facebook page and/or Twitter Tweets are worth the effort (you’ll find they will be). One thing Google Analytics has helped us find out: People search for our name over a dozen different ways to get to our site, including misspellings (“text a libranian”).

2. Content – This one is great because it shows you where people are going on your site, the busiest pages. You can see how many patrons are visiting your “Ask Us” or “Ask a Librarian” page and if it’s not up to par with some other pages, find the one most visited and make sure there is a prominent link to that particular page to see how you can direct more traffic to encourage patrons to ask questions (or more specifically, how to utilize your new text message reference services).

3. Site Overlay - As a part of the Content section, Site Overlay is where things get really interesting. It puts an “overlay” (as the name suggests) on top of your site and then gives you %s on where people are clicking to when they’re on that page.
There are many other great tools that are part of the Google Analytics package, but these are a great place to start seeing how people are finding your site and what they’re doing once they get there.

Trick – The “Marketing Possibilities are Everywhere” Exercise

This isn’t so much a “trick” as in a magic trick, but more of an exercise in getting your mind to think about all of the places where marketing can take place. If you’re already a marketing oriented person, you may already do this, but if not, it’s a great exercise. For a whole week, challenge yourself each day to write down at least 1 unique way of marketing a service that isn’t already being used. It’s ok if you find out later that it already is, it’s the exercise that’s important.

Example: Every time I fly, I wear my Mosio T-Shirt. Why? Besides the fact that I love it and that it’s very soft, there are thousands of people at the airport, including a few hundred that will be on the plane with me. Those are all brand impressions, I literally see people looking down at the logo. Plus, in some cases, someone will ask “What is Mosio?” and I get an opportunity to talk about our company and what we do. Our shirts are intentionally simple. No huge letters or slogans, no website addresses, just the logo, making it the only thing the eyes can focus on. We offer Text a Librarian T-Shirts on a site called Spreadshirt. We don’t make any money from them, people pay what we pay, but this is another great opportunity to promote your service or strike up a conversation about the service.

(You always get a second chance to make a brand impression)

So what ideas can you think of? What places would be great to put a marketing message? Write them down, 1 or more a day, for a week and see how your thinking has changed. After finishing the exercise and thinking about marketing for a week, begin thinking about the areas and places where you could market your own library services. See what new comes to mind and how it can be done in your library or community.

How To – Manage Social Media Presence Multiple Places

So you have a presence on: Myspace, Facbook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc, etc, etc, and managing them all can be a hassle. First, we’re not advocates of having an account on every social network on earth. In fact, we think it’s better to have fewer with focused strategies on how you’ll use them. Even adding 2-3, plus your own website, email newsletters, printed materials and anything else can be a full time job in and of itself. Luckily, there are several tools you can use to help you manage your social media output.

HelloTxt - Originally, I was going to post about how you can use the Facebook Twitter Application to post Tweets to your Library’s Facebook page, but with the sporatic reports of the Twitter App on Facebook not working I thought it best to write about another useful site called HelloTxt, that has been gaining steady growth since I first heard about it more than a year ago. It lets you post once and updates to any of 45 social networks through their APIs. If the last thing you want to do is join another “thing” (we can understand this), then we at least want to give you the link to the Twitter Facebook App that lets you post your Twitter tweets to your Facebook Page’s Wall.

Start Pages - We recently wrote a post about how you can use start pages as virtual reference tools, it included Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle, all of which can be also used as a way to manage multiple places at once. In fact, they are the absolute best way to do that. Each has varying options for widgets, gadgets, flakes, modules, etc (they differ in what they’re called based on the service, but all mean the same thing). They give you quick access to: Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, 43 Things, blogs and a handful of email programs.

So that’s all of them, Library Marketing Tips 1-4. We hope you learned some ideas on how you can better promote text messaging reference services to your community. Mobile messaging is growing at a rapid pace in the U.S., there is a lot of excitement around the mobile channel, so getting the word out to patrons and your community gives you an opportunity to extend your outreach by expanding the walls of your library on mobile devices.

A new study shows 2/3 of marketers are using social media. Indeed, it is a very important element of promoting products and services, but what about getting back to the basics?

Word of mouth is, and will always be, the best form of marketing.

Qualified referrals from trusted sources play a vital role in customer decision-making. There’s nothing like a recommendation from a friend, family member or associate to help introduce and endorse new products and services. These recommendations increase consideration and participation across the board.

New services at your library are no exception. Adding text messaging to reference services  means harnessing the mobile channel to increase outreach by connecting with patrons wherever they are. This is a cool concept and a useful service. Why not reach out to those people in your circle to let them know? Maybe they will find the service helpful. Maybe they know others who will too.

Word of Mouth 101

A great introduction to Word of Mouth Marketing 101 can be found at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association website. For this post we’re going to focus on two of the five basic elements they highlight:

* Educate people about your products and services
* Provide tools that make it easier to share information

For years, the Faberge Organic Shampoo commercial has been a great example for how word of mouth marketing works. In the commercial, a woman talks about loving her shampoo and telling 2 friends, who tell 2 friends and so on – this is Word of Mouth Marketing 101 in its simplest form.

Start Internally

When we make major announcements or launches at Mosio/Text a Librarian, everyone on the team is encouraged to tell friends, family and associates. Usually, a single email is sent internally to give quick “copy/paste” info. That way, everyone has the information bullets and can pass along in their own voice. Depending on the context of the announcement, in addition to emailing, it may also be encouraged to post online (Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc). It is never required and always optional, but whether or not someone chooses to pass the information along, s/he has the tools to make it easy. At the very least, now everyone knows.

Email Still Works

This isn’t to simply say “send out an email to your list and the world will show up at your door.” An effective email, even sent to your personal contacts, must have a compelling subject line, easy-to-digest content and clear main points, thus making it a quick read with defined takeaways. Those elements will not only help tell your story but will allow the recipient to easily share with friends and colleagues too.

Adding “Please forward this email to anyone that you think will find it helpful.” or something similar can work really well to extend the reach beyond your address book. It’s not pushy and lets everyone know that it’s ok, and welcomed, to forward along if they choose.

Contextual Contacts

They may not currently be in your virtual Rolodex, but establishing relationships with local teachers, student union representatives, education professionals, before-and-after school program instructors, community center staff and other contextual contacts can go a long ways to spread the word about library services. The wider net you can cast, the better.

If these groups are already on your contact list, continue to keep them updated. It can be as simple as asking them if they want to sign-up for a library newsletter to get news and information that could benefit their students, members and patrons. They might also be willing to distribute or place library marketing materials at their information desks.

Encourage the Social

Of course, the importance of word of mouth marketing through the sharing utilities of social media cannot be overlooked, but must taken in context based on any number of factors that would consider a recommendation as truly qualified. That said, the more exposure a product or service has as a result of social media sharing, the greater the likelihood that individuals will take the time to investigate to determine their own level of interest.

There are a handful of ways to make it easy for people to share information…about anything. These services give you a little bit of code to copy/paste onto your website, blog, etc so readers can easily share the information via email or a handful of other social media services. We’ve listed 3 below and use Add This simply because we have for awhile. All seem to work well and Add This claims to be the biggest. If someone is excited enough, they’ll figure out a way of telling others, but you might as well make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Here are a few to consider:
Add This
Add to Any
ShareThis

Other Ideas

* Email Signatures - These make every email a marketing tool, are simple to update and can have mass reach from lots of sources. They can also help spark conversations with contacts that you communicate with, but would not normally send an announcement email.

* Add Footers on Your Reference Answers - You can add a footer to reference emails if you’re responding to patrons via email, or manually type out a footer at the end of an IM conversation (using a ” * ” symbol helps delineate a footer message from the body of text). Text a Librarian has an SMS Footer option that lets libraries add a small message at the end of a response.  If your library offers SMS reference, you can try something like “Tell a Friend to Text Us!” in your SMS Footer.

There are certainly many other ways that companies and organizations have successfully utilized word of mouth marketing not mentioned here, and we look forward to trying some out ourselves.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

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